The increasing complexity of system designs, increased investment required due to this complexity, and shortened product cycles have presented significant challenges to post-silicon design verification of chipsets. This is especially true with respect to high-end cache coherent non-uniform memory access (“ccNUMA”) chipsets where systems can be extremely large and complex. Processor post-silicon verification is typically focused on electrical verification at least as much as functional verification due to the large amount of full custom design. Chipsets present a different challenge due to the large number of cells of which they are comprised. Additionally, due to the sheer number of buses, internal bus arbitration, cache coherency control, queue arbitration, etc., in a large ccNUMA server, post-silicon functional verification of such a chipset consumes a greater amount of resources with respect to electrical verification than processors typically consume. Internal observability, while relatively simple in pre-silicon verification, poses a major obstacle to debug and functional test coverage.
Determining when system verification is complete is a second major obstacle to completing post-silicon verification in a time-effective manner. While pre-silicon simulation-based testing depends significantly on labor intensive directed and pseudo-random testing, post-silicon testing has historically depended on observing system operations that imply correct behavior.
Performing post-silicon design verification is an industry standard practice that facilitates exposure of bugs not typically uncovered in pre-silicon verification. Typical post-silicon bugs discovered include those that are manifested after long or at-speed operation of the system, those resulting due to incorrect modeling of hardware and firmware interfaces, those resulting from Register-Transfer Language (“RTL”) errors that escaped pre-silicon detection, and those resulting from incorrect mapping of RTL-to-silicon (synthesis/physical bugs). Accepted methods of exercising systems to expose post-silicon bugs include running operating systems and software applications targeted for the final system, creating specific directed software tests that stress different portions of the system, and running software tests that create random system operations.
Real-time observability (“RTO”) refers to the ability to monitor and capture internal signals in real time either on- or off-chip. While internal signal observability features have been available in some field programmable gate array (“FPGA”) architectures and application specific integrated circuits (“ASICs”), they have typically been of limited scope. Limiting factors have been silicon area, wiring constraints, and I/O limitations. In addition, observability features have traditionally been used for debug and not functional test coverage.